THE Press Association of Ireland was threatened with heavy fines and jail sentences by Justice Frederick Morris last week after revealing that it had gained access to his report on garda corruption in Co Donegal before the official launch.

The wire service, the Irish arm of the London-based Press Association (PA), was suspected of hacking into the tribunal’s website to obtain the report. Michael McDowell, the justice minister, claimed that more than 350 separate attempts were made to overcome internet security measures guarding a web version of the report, forcing the authorities to release it earlier than planned.

McDowell did not say who was responsible, but The Sunday Times has established that the “hacking” was traced to PA’s building in Harcourt Street, central Dublin.

Morris, a former High Court president, told journalists at the wire service that he would prosecute anyone who published his report before its official release for obstructing or hindering the work of the tribunal, an offence carrying up to €12,700 in fines and up to two years in prison.

The judge wrote personally to PA in an urgently faxed letter on Tuesday, after staff at the agency contacted the tribunal to verify the authenticity of the report they had found on the web. PA, Britain and Ireland’s largest news agency, immediately agreed to observe the embargo on publication.

PA declined to comment this weekend, but a source at the agency confirmed that the Dublin office got a phone call from a source who explained how to get the report from the website.

“Personally, I think it was a bit of a security cock-up by the tribunal,” the PA source said. “The web link was morristribunal.ie/ and then a series of numbers.”

A government source, however, said the computer used to attack the web security around the report was in the same Dublin building as the PA office. Rogue computer software known as spyware was attached to the server used to “air” the Morris tribunal website.

This spyware then uncovered the secret web link to the tribunal’s report when it was being stored in a supposedly secure location before the official government release.

The spyware notified the hacker when the report was put on the web at 10am on Tuesday, the source said. Over the 70 minutes, 350 attempts were made to access it.

The release of the report was brought forward several days by McDowell after discussions with the tribunal over the compromised security. No complaint has been made to gardai by the tribunal, although experts were able to trace the unique identification number of the computer used to hack into the tribunal site.

The last-minute flurry of intrigue before the publication of the report was not without irony given that telecommunications records featured significantly in the Morris findings.

The absence of records of calls made to a phone hoax victim proved a huge obstacle to the garda investigation into the death of Richie Barron, an apparent hit-and-run victim. Morris found that Michael Peoples, the victim of the extortion attempt, and his wife Charlotte were “upright citizens” whose truthfulness was in no doubt.

He said that William Doherty from Raphoe, a garda informant handled by Garda John O’Dowd, tried to extort money by phone from Peoples by threatening to implicate him in Barron’s death.

But “the efficiency of the state system of investigating telephone communications had been left by (Telecom Eireann) in an appalling state”, the tribunal found.

Official garda requests for the phone records to Peoples’s home went unrewarded for more than six months in 1996 and 1997. Throughout this time, efforts by O’Dowd and others to implicate Peoples in Barron’s death, already pinned on cousins Frank McBrearty Jr and Mark McConnell, flourished in the absence of records of Doherty’s calls.

Yet Billy Flynn, a private investigator, linked Doherty to the hoax calls within days of being retained by the Peoples family in 1997. Crucially, Flynn established that one of the calls was made from the home of O’Dowd.

“At that time, an utterly appalling miasma of delay stymied legitimate investigations,” the Morris report found. “This was due to the inefficiency and neglect of Telecom Eireann to apply sufficient and adequate resources to their public obligation to assist in garda inquiries.”

The tribunal was satisfied, however, that the Peoples family’s phone data was lost during a changeover from tape-based methods of storing data to a more efficient computer system, and nothing more sinister.

“The fact that such a shocking situation could block the investigation of a crime has been rectified,” Morris said.

Morris concluded “it cannot be proved” that either O’Dowd or Supt Kevin Lennon, his commanding officer, planned the Doherty phone hoax. But, he said, O’Dowd “must have been aware that Doherty was manipulating evidence” and he noted that Lennon subsequently advised O’Dowd on a strategy of refusal to answer questions.

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